How to increase Website Page Speed and improve Google Search Rank

Users want to receive answers to their questions and find the desired content as quickly as possible. They enjoy when websites load very fast and may get irritated when waiting. Actually, if the page loads for more than 3 seconds, it’s considered as too long to ensure the seamless user experience. That’s why the higher the speed is, the higher the position in Google search will be, and the more visitors will come to your site.

However, if before to optimize the loading time was necessary for desktop searches, now it’s the key ranking indicator for mobile search, too. On July 9, 2018, Google released the “Speed Update”, a new ranking algorithm, focusing on mobile page speed.

Since a major part of Internet users don’t wait for long seconds while the content becomes available, many companies pay a lot of attention to this metric. Otherwise, they lose either the current or new audience coming from organic search.

The “Speed Update” introduced the following main changes:

1. Mobile page speed is more important for achieving high Google search rankings than the desktop page speed.

2. If the website page speed is low, an “ad quality score” indicator is also lower. The lower this score is, the more you’ll have to pay for launching a Google advertising campaign.

Therefore, to reach the desirable top Google search position, you need to create a top-notch website or update the existing one. In our web app development company, we’d like to highlight the following steps that you should follow:

1. Develop a nice design of your web pages. The design should be intuitive, which means that users are able to use it even without thinking.

2. Create relevant content. Remember it must be useful, which means that it should answer questions of your target audience.

3. Make sure the website content is totally unique: you can check this metric on platforms like Advego, 1Text.com, or Copywritely.

4. Produce and publish content on a regular basis, for instance, in your company’s blog. Prepare and follow a SEO (search engine optimization) strategy.

5. Create an adequate backlink profile. This will help you increase search rankings and attract traffic from relevant sources.

If your website fails to take top positions on Google, you need to investigate root causes using specific online services. This analysis will let you understand the problem and see how to fix it.

Here at Smartym Pro, we recommend employing the following tools:

1. Google PageSpeed Insights — analyzes the content, evaluates optimization quality, and enables you to receive reports on the page loading speed on mobile devices and desktops. Furthermore, this tool offers recommendations on how to enhance the overall situation.

2. Lighthouse — a free open-source tool allowing to improve the quality of web pages. You can use it for any website (if it is publicly available and doesn’t require user authorization) by putting URL into it. Lighthouse enables site owners to analyze SEO, speed, accessibility, and other important metrics. After running a series of audits, it generates a report that gives you a full picture of the website performance and some tips on how to make it better.

3. Chrome User Experience Report — creates a report that includes user experience metrics for how real-world site visitors experience popular Internet destinations.

Although all of these tools provide truly useful information and tips on website performance, quality, and optimization, sometimes this is not enough for achieving top search engine positions. Even after following personalized advice, rankings may not change (or increase but just a bit). As our practice shows, there are some technical activities that you might need to do in order to obtain great results.

Take a look at several recommendations from our own experience:

1. Make sure that the web development team has configured resource compression when creating a web solution on the client-server. Check if there is an additional gzip compression on the server.

2. Optimize all images — apply various formats, for example, WebP or Progressive JPEG. Compress or crop images with the help of specific tools such as TinyPNG. Mobile browsers don’t like having to load too large pictures with a 2000 pixels’ width while having a maximum width of 450-500 pixels. We also recommend getting rid of complex sliders as they slow down the page speed. Put icons in SVG format.

3. Employ lazy content loading, a technique that defers loading of non-critical resources at website load time. Instead, they are loaded when needed.

4. Cash server requests to increase the speed of web pages. We also employ service-workers to cash resources on users’ devices.

5. Only the necessary styles and scripts must be loaded as a result of the website visitor’s interaction with the web content.

6. Employ Content Delivery Network (CDN) as web page data warehousing to increase the speed of TTI and FCP indicators.

Now our team at Smartym Pro continues experimenting with different tools and approaches to enhance our page load speed. Recently, for example, our specialists have transferred the company’s website from WordPress to JAM Stack.

Previously, the server was functioning (generating web pages) each time during request execution. With JAM Stack, our engineers have already managed to generate static pages and put them into the Content Delivery Network “folder”.

When users enter the site, they receive instant access to these static pages. So, instead of generating the same page 100 times, we have just one page per the same 100 requests. As a consequence, we save time and resources.

Although the migration to JAM Stack is in progress, our team has already reached search rankings improvement, and we are waiting for more visible results.

If you have questions about improving the web page speed and reaching top search positions, feel free to ask. Our web developers will help you resolve your issues and provide meaningful recommendations. Good luck!